Wednesday, August 12, 2009

How to make a Fantasy Sandbox

Unlike a Traveller Sandbox making a Fantasy Sandbox is less straightforward. This is because Traveller at the stellar level has a uniform geography while a fantasy setting can have any type of geography imaginable including the fantastic like lands floating on shards of a shattered world.

If talking a fantasy setting I would do the following

Using one page sketch a world or continent map

Label important regions

Write one page of background giving no more than a handful of sentences to each region.

Pick an area roughly 200 miles by 150 miles

Grab a 8.5 by 11 sheet of hex paper.

The scale should be so that it represents a 200 by 150 mile region

Draw in mountains

Draw in rivers

Draw in hills using them to divide the region into distinct river valley

Draw in vegetation (swamps, forests, desert, etc)

Decide to place Population Locales note their race this includes social monsters

Decide to place Lairs (locales tht revolves around a home of monsters)

Decide to place Ruins (locales that revolves around a site)

Decide to place miscellaneous locales. (anything that doesn't fit a above.

Name your geography (don't forget islands)

Write a Half Page background describing the region and it's history.

Write a paragraph describing each named geography

Write a paragraph describing each Population Locale

Write a paragraph describing each Lair (you could get away with a stat block)

Write a paragraph describing each Ruin

Look at your notes and come up with two to four plots that ties one or more locales together. Write a paragraph or two on each.

For each population locale come up with three to five encounters. They should be a sentence each.

Come up with 6 to 12 general encounter for the region as a whole. Should usable in any area of the region. They are a sentence or two each.

Pick the 4 or 6 most important Population locales and draw a quarter page sketch map of the settlement.

Pick the starting population locale and draw a full page map of the settlement. This is the "Home Base"

Scan your description for any regional organization and write a paragraph on them. Fully stat the most common encounters involved with them.

Make up a rumor chart with 10 to 20 items that feeds the players into the encounter and plots you created in above.

Identify major regions and create a random encounter chart for each (monsters, wildlife and NPCs) [Thanks Jeff I just plumb forgot]

This will probably run to about 10,000 words. You can do this in about 2 weeks spending about 2 hours an evening at a 1,000 words a evening and time drawing maps. Or consider it about 24 hours of work.

I may have missed you discussing this - when in this process do you think about things that affect your entire setting (or at least large parts of it)? I'm thinking of things like special laws of nature (viz or ley lines, etc), religious orders, Magic guilds, gypsies, and so on.

Great outline on making a fantasy Sandbox game. I myself have created one and I discuss it in my blog, though I was going by another bloggers directions. This seems to cover everything in more detail though. Good stuff!

I am finding this series very interesting and useful. Some bits better than others but very good overall and I will be referring to this for my next game.

Also, bought your Wilderlands book on Lulu.com and wow, what a bargain, less than a penny a page, not many roleplaying products are such a deal these days! Plus I got free shipping so I can't wait for it to print and arrive. Got anything for Traveller?

Thanks for writing this up! I'm currently using this to make my own fantasy sandbox over at my blog. I'm going for a high level of detail and realism, which your guide is great for. Glad to have found it!

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.